Binders

Editor for depth, Composer for breadth

Oghmere has two writing surfaces, and the choice between them is what a binder is for. The Editor opens one document at a time with its full chrome — outline, comments, history, integrity, publish, and (for scripts) script tools and gap coaching. The Composer, opened from a binder, stitches every document in that binder into one scroll so you can read and edit across them as a single flow. Reach for the Editor to go deep on one document; reach for the Composer to read or edit breadth — several chapters at once, or the seam between two of them. Each surface links to the other: a boundary in the Composer offers “Open in Editor” for that document, and a document that belongs to a binder shows “In binder” in the Editor, linking back.

A binder is a saved, ordered collection of documents. Think of it as a playlist for your manuscript: you pick which documents belong, put them in the order you want them read, and that arrangement is saved for you to return to. A document can live in several binders at once, and reordering a binder never moves your folders or changes your project’s structure — it is a separate view on top of the same documents.

Binders are useful whenever the same writing needs to appear in more than one arrangement: a Patreon edition, a Gumroad edition and an Amazon edition that share the same chapters but each add their own bonus pages; or a “first act” binder you assemble for a beta reader.

The Binders page

Open Binders from the project sidebar. The page has two parts: your binders at the top, and a “Not in a binder” area below listing every document that isn’t in any binder yet. Drag a document from that area straight into a binder, or use the create button to make a new document without leaving the page. Once every document belongs to a binder, that area collapses to a single line. On a brand-new project with no documents, it shows you how to make your first one.

Building a binder

Create a binder and open it. Add documents with “Add documents” or by dragging them in from the “Not in a binder” area. You can also drag a document straight onto “New Binder” to mint a binder that already contains it, then type a name and press Enter — or click “New Binder” to name an empty one first. Dropping a document onto an existing binder adds it to the end. Inside a binder, drag the cards or rows to set their order. Remove a document from a binder at any time — that only takes it out of the binder; the document itself is untouched.

A binder with no documents in it opens straight onto the document picker instead of an empty editor: the project’s other documents appear as tiles you add by clicking or dragging, and if the project has none yet you can create one right there without leaving the screen. The Composer and the view tabs appear the moment the first document lands, and removing the last document returns you to the picker.

• Body — the main flow of the binder — your chapters.
• Front matter — pages placed before the body when you publish — a title page or foreword.
• Back matter — pages placed after the body — an author bio, a bonus scene, an afterword.

Four ways to view a binder

• Composer — every document stitched into one scroll, each in its own editor with labelled boundaries, so you can read and edit the binder as a single flow.
• Outline — a compact, numbered list — a scannable table of contents.
• Board — a corkboard of cards, each showing a document’s synopsis, status and length.
• Publish — save publish targets and produce a file for a venue (see below).

Synopses

Each card on the Board can carry a short synopsis — a sentence or two describing what the document contains. You can write it yourself, or use the ✨ button to have Oghmere draft one from the document’s text. A drafted synopsis is only ever a description of what you already wrote; it lands in the box for you to review and save, and Oghmere never rewrites your prose.

Merging and splitting documents in Composer view

In Composer view, placing your cursor at the very start of a document and pressing Backspace folds that document up into the one above it — the two become one. Because a document can appear in more than one binder, Oghmere warns you first and names any other binders that document belongs to, so a merge is never a surprise. Every merge is snapshotted before it happens and can be undone from the structural-history panel beside the editor.

Splitting is the inverse. Put your cursor where a document should divide and press Alt+Shift+S: everything from that point down moves into a new document named “Split from …”, inserted right after the original in the binder, with the caret waiting at the top of the new document so you can rename it and keep writing. The original keeps its title, role and place. Like a merge, a split is snapshotted first and can be undone from the structural-history panel, which restores the original document exactly.

How much a coach reads in Composer view

Composer view is the one surface where you choose how widely a coach reads. Above the coaching panel, Coaching scope offers three settings: Selection coaches the passage you have highlighted, This document coaches the whole section your cursor is in, and Whole binder reads every document in the binder, in order. Selection is line-level craft; the wider two ask whether the piece does its job, and whether the work holds together. Whole binder is offered only here — the single-document editor has the first two.

Widening the scope is always deliberate, and it always shows you the price first. Every binder opens on Selection, so an expensive scope is never carried over from the last binder you coached; Oghmere remembers the scope you chose per binder after that. Anything wider than Selection goes through a confirm that names the credits the pass will spend and how much of your writing that scope will read, updating as you change scope — nothing runs until you accept it. If a binder is longer than the coach can read in one pass, Oghmere says so and declines the run rather than quietly reading part of it and talking as though it had read the whole thing.

A widened pass is advisory like every other coach: it observes and asks, and never rewrites your prose. Because an observation about a whole binder has no single passage to attach to, these turns stay in the coaching panel rather than becoming anchored comments.

Keyboard navigation in Composer view

The keyboard treats the whole binder as one document. Arrow keys carry the caret from the last line of one document into the next, and back again; Page Up and Page Down move a screen at a time across document boundaries and keep the caret with the view. Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End (Cmd+Up and Cmd+Down on a Mac) jump to the very start or end of the binder. Home and End still move to the start or end of the current line, and selecting text with Shift stays within one document.

Formatting and exporting in Composer view

Composer view has the same formatting toolbar as the single-document editor, pinned at the top of the scroll. It acts on whichever document your cursor is in, so headings, lists, alignment, tables, links, highlights and images all work while you read the binder as one flow — and selecting text brings up the inline formatting menu. The toolbar’s Export menu downloads the whole binder as one file (Word, PDF, Markdown, HTML or plain text), its documents stitched together in binder order.

Publishing a binder

On the Publish tab, add one or more targets. A target is a saved combination of a format (Kindle/EPUB, print PDF, Word, Web or Markdown), an assembly template and an optional theme. Publishing a target assembles the binder — front matter, body, then back matter — through the same publishing engine the rest of the app uses, and drops the finished file in the project’s Publishing history to download. One binder can hold several targets, so “Amazon” can produce a Kindle EPUB and a print PDF from the same chapters.